Indonesia Volcano Death Toll Hits 153

The death toll in two weeks of eruptions from Indonesia's most volatile volcano has risen to 153.

Residents of the city at the base of Mount Merapi are fleeing, afraid that the volcano will erupt again. It is still spewing ash, though it has not had a major eruption since Friday.

In that blast, whole villages were smothered and people were cut down by searing gases that raced down the mountain at highway speeds.

A hospital at the base of the volcano says that 12 more bodies were brought to the morgue Tuesday, including seven pulled from a destroyed village. Another five people who were being treated for burns died.

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The volcano, in the heart of densely populated Java island, has erupted scores of times, killing more than 1,500 people in the last century alone. But tens of thousands of people live on its rolling slopes, drawn to soil made fertile by molten lava and volcanic debris.

Its latest activity started Oct. 26. After Friday's explosion - said by volcanologists to be the biggest since the 1870s - officials announced by loudspeaker that the mountain's danger zone had been expanded to 12 miles from the crater.

Previously, villages like Bronggang were still considered to be in the "safe zone."

"The heat surrounded us and there was white smoke everywhere," said Niti Raharjo, 47, who was thrown from his motorbike along with his 19-year-old son while trying to flee.

"I saw people running, screaming in the dark, women so scared they fell unconscious," he said from a hospital where they were both being treated for burns.

"There was an explosion that sounded like it was from a war ... and it got worse, the ash and debris raining down."

The greatest danger posed by Merapi has always been pyroclastic flows - like those that roared down the southern slopes at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour.

With bodies found in front of houses and in streets, it appeared that many of the villagers died from the searing gas while trying to escape, said Col. Tjiptono, a deputy police chief.

More than 150 injured people - most with burns and some with respiratory problems, broken bones and cuts - waited to be treated at the tiny Sardjito hospital, where the bodies piled up in the morgue, and two other hospitals.

"We're totally overwhelmed here!" said Heru Nogroho, a spokesman at Sardjito.

Despite earlier predictions that dozens of big explosions that followed the initial blast last week would ease pressure building up behind a magma dome, eruptions have been intensifying, baffling experts who have long monitored Merapi.

In terms of the amount of volcanic material released - 1,765 million cubic feet, "it was the biggest in at least a century," said Gede Swantika, a state volcanologist, as plumes of smoke continued to shoot up more than 30,000 feet.

More than 100,000 people living along Merapi's fertile slopes have been evacuated to crowded emergency shelters, many by force, in the last week. Some return to their villages during lulls in activity, however, to tend to their livestock.

They were told to stay away on Friday.

Even scientists from Merapi's monitoring station were told they had to pack up and move down the mountain. They were scrambling to repair four of their five seismographs destroyed by the heavy soot showers.

Before Friday, the death toll from Merapi stood at 44, with most dying in the Oct. 26 blast. With the new deaths around the village of Bronggang it climbed to 122, the National Disaster Management Agency said on its website.

In 1994, 60 people were killed by Merapi, while in 1930, more than a dozen villages were torched, leaving up to 1,300 dead.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 235 million people, is prone to earthquakes and volcanos because it sits along the Pacific "Ring of Fire," a horseshoe-shaped string of faults that lines the Pacific Ocean.

The volcano's initial blast occurred less than 24 hours after a towering tsunami slammed into the remote Mentawai islands on the western end of the country, sweeping entire villages to sea and killing at least 428 people.

There, too, thousands of people were displaced, many living in government camps.